n. the rising of a body of water and its overflowing onto normally dry land

n. clay or silt or gravel carried by rushing streams and deposited where the stream slows down

n. gradual formation of new land, by recession of the sea or deposit of sediment

Etymologies

Latin alluviō, alluviōn-, from alluere, to wash against : ad-, ad- + -luere, to wash; see leu(ə)- in Indo-European roots.

(American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

Examples

The accessions, which are made to land, bordering upon rivers, follow the land, say the civilians, provided it be made by what they call alluvion, that is, insensibly and imperceptibly; which are circumstances, that assist the imagination in the conjunction.

The accessions, which are made to lands bordering upon rivers, follow the land, say the civilians, provided it be made by what they call alluvion, that is, Insensibly and Imperceptibly; which are circumstances that mightily assist the imagination in the conjunction.

The Bayou Pierre, three hundred feet wide and too deep to ford, leaves the Red River a few miles below Shreveport, and after a long course, in which it frequently expands into lakes, returns to its parent stream three miles above Grand Ecore, dividing the pine-clad hills on the west from the alluvion of the river on the east.

Navigable for more than a hundred miles, preserving at all seasons an equal breadth and depth, so gentle is its flow that it might be taken for a canal, did not the charming and graceful curves, by which it separates the undulating prairies of Attakapas from the alluvion of the Atchafalaya, mark it as the handiwork of Nature.

The vale below, like that they had left, opened into a wider bottom-land, the bed of a creek, which they could see shining among the trees that overshadowed the rich alluvion; and into this poured a rivulet that chattered along through the glen at their feet, in which it had its sources.

There are two denominations of prairie: the upland, and the river or bottom prairie; the latter is more fertile than the former, having a greater body of alluvion, yet there are many of the upland prairies extremely rich, particularly those in the neighbourhood of the Wabash.